This fall, I decided to sign up for some clinics at my squash club. I enjoy the sport and find it to be an amazing workout. But I’d like to get better.
For the uninitiated, squash is a racquet sport that essentially played in a giant box. Because the ball bounces a lot less than a tennis ball, the game…

Thinking like a lawyer is good for your clients. They are paying you to be skeptical and not take at face value what opposing counsel or the lawyer on the other side of a deal is saying. Being pessimistic and analytical helps your clients avoid unnecessary legal risk.
But outside of work, we need to wear a different hat.  Thinking…

Giving referrals is one of the best ways to get referrals. It is human nature to want to reciprocate. If you send business to one of your referral sources, you increase the chances that they will send work back to you.
Of course it is important to choose your referral sources strategically (see “Want to Generate More Referrals? Connect with…

AI is giving us the opportunity to create images at zero cost. I’ve been playing with it to generate images for some LinkedIn posts.  But sometimes it really gets it wrong.  See my dialogue with DALL-E  (I needed a quarterback to illustrate something.)  Look below at the first and second to last image that DALL-E created for me.  😆
Here…

As attorneys, we share many qualities that make us effective in representing our clients. Our skepticism, aversion to risk, sense of urgency, competitiveness, and pessimism, can all be good for out clients.
But when it comes to building a practice, advancing our careers, or taking on leadership roles, we are more effective when we remove our lawyering hats.
As it…

This past year, I’ve been writing and speaking a lot about lawyer personalities (see e.g.  here and here.)  My basic argument is that the things that make us good lawyers (our skepticism, our aversion to risk, our sense of urgency, our competitiveness, etc.) can interfere with our relationship building.
And relationship building is the foundation of all business development.…

What is executive presence, why is it important to your career advancement, and what can you do to build it?
Those were some of the topics I discussed with John Buckley on the Counsel to Counsel Podcast.
Over the summer, I heard John give a great presentation on this topic for the American Bar Association and I decided I had…